A few years ago, all the chefs I talked to were hunting down René Redzepi's book. That's how I first heard about the young Danish chef rebelling against the Eurocentric culinary scene in Copenhagen, getting back to his Nordic roots.

Some of them likened Redzepi to a young Michel Bras, a reclusive French chef with an almost spiritual connection to his regional ingredients. These chefs hadn't visited Redzepi's restaurant. They hadn't met him or seen him on TV. Sometimes, they didn't know the guy's name, only the name of his restaurant, Noma, which had opened back in 2003. But they were fascinated by Nordisk Mad, which was, and still is, damn near impossible to find in English (it's out of print, unfortunately).

Courtesy of Phaidon Press

Redzepi was already a star within the industry, respected among chefs for doing his own thing, when this year, his restaurant climbed to the number one spot in Restaurant Magazine's annual 50-best list (which Spain's elBulli had previously topped for four straight years).

So, the second book has benefitted from really good timing. In early October, Phaidon will release NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. Simply, it's a gorgeous cookbook, well worth its price tag of $49.95—a dense journal of the restaurant's culture, philosophy, and food with beautiful photography and design.

Though the book is set in a cold place, with tales of freezing journeys into the Scandinavian underbelly to root around for edibles, the book's warmth is palpable—with one exception. The story of Noma, written by journalist Rune Skyum-Nielsen, is in dry and at times awkwardly clinical prose. The language seems unreasonably formal for a restaurant that deviates in so many ways from traditional, formal fine dining. (At Noma, the cooks who prepare the dishes serve them to guests, tables are free of tablecloths, Icelandic sheepskins cover the backs of diners' seats, and the knives at a table are often mismatched).

But Redzepi's story is tucked in this chapter. And it's good.

René Redzepi grew up bilingual, with a Macedonian father who worked as a taxi driver, a Danish mother who worked as a housekeeper, and a twin brother who was generally better at stuff than he was. Because they weren't well-off, the frozen food aisles of the 1980s were off-limits to the family, who ate simply cooked foods, killing their own chickens for dinner and milking cows to make butter at home.

Courtesy of Phaidon Press

At 15, following a friend, not knowing what else to do with himself, Redzepi went to a year-long restaurant school, apprenticing after graduation at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen called Pierre André, Le Jardin des Sens in France, elBulli in Spain, and The French Laundry. By the time he was 25, Claus Meyer approached him to open Noma in a converted warehouse at the end of a dock in Copenhagen.

The goal: build a great restaurant that celebrates Danish cuisine. Step one: Figure out Danish cuisine.

Danish fine dining existed. It just wasn't very Danish. So much so that Redzepi's unnamed peers mocked the idea, apparently nicknaming the restaurant "Whale Penis" and "Seal Fucker" (one imagines there's no worse insult for a Nordic bully to dish out on the playground). Traditional local ingredients were considered of much lower quality than say, imported French ones. Not by everyone, though—Meyer had been championing Danish cooking culture for 15 years with books and a long running cooking show.

The story of the restaurant has a happy ending, of course, and it's followed by pages from Redzepi's journal, the one he kept leading up to the opening of the restaurant as he traveled for inspiration and ingredient-sourcing. Here, he documents the train rides and the snacks, the experimental tastings of wild roots and berries, and the meetings along the way with fellow chefs, cookery teachers, and guides. Bonus: You'll probably learn the days of the week in Danish by reading this section.

Redzepi has also written nine short, lovely essays that appear at the end of the book on pink paper, each profiling a different forager or farmer who provides the restaurant with key seasonal ingredients: a woodsman who brings him sweet birch sap for about six weeks in early spring, a florist and translator who forages berries and truffles with her son, and a dairy farmer who keeps 50 Danish Reds, horned, near-extinct heritage cows, feeding them beets, corn, and hay grown on the same pastures.

A fold-out treasure map plots these characters on the region's islands, forests, coasts, and plains. Even for those familiar with Scandinavian geography, it's nice to get a sense of the restaurant's place (on the edge of an island between Denmark and Sweden). Also, it's adorable, like something from a children's adventure book.

An armchair chef might dreamily flip through the photos and read the essays, absorbing the instructions from the recipes, imagining the flavor combinations.

In addition, the images by Ditte Isager, a Danish, New York-based photographer, are spectacular. Isager had previously worked with John Besh, Gordon Ramsay, and Padma Lakshmi on their cookbooks, and took the photos for Redzepi's first book. The photos, styled by Christine Rudolph, have a clean, simple aesthetic and a natural palette of wood, stone, and iron.

The oversized captions for the pictures of ingredients, dishes, portraits, and landscapes appear indexed in six-page clusters, and even those are a joy. Ingredients have brief notes on where they were found or how to eat them, while some have dorky little food facts about things like mussel eggs or carrot colors. Every photo is marked with a page number for the corresponding recipe, and vice versa.

It's a professional cookbook, so measurements are precise, in grams, and instructions are minimal but clear. Meat appears somewhat rarely, and when it does, like many fine dining restaurants at this point, Redzepi favors sous-vide cooking (in which the raw meat is sealed in plastic and poached in hot water). Though in his case, the meat is more likely to be musk ox than beef.

There's special attention on fruit vinegars and pickles of all sorts, which, jarred in season, are especially important for the restaurant in the winter, when very little is growing outside.

Courtesy of Phaidon Press

Since Redzepi's ingredients are collected from another time and place than your own, it will be difficult in some cases (not all) if you're looking to actually replicate dishes from the restaurant. While a simple dish like poached eggs with radishes might inspire something similar in your kitchen, you might not be able to procure the sea lettuce that finishes the plate. But that isn't the point!

A book this personal, this generous, isn't for duplicating. It's for inspiring. For playing. An armchair chef might dreamily flip through the photos and read the essays, absorbing the instructions from the recipes, imagining the flavor combinations. An adventurous cook might apply that sea lettuce technique—pickled, protected with baking paper and heated until translucent—to the greens he can find.

A good restaurant cookbook offers more than recipes and a peek into a kitchen. It gets across a complete vision, a story, a sense of style—something deeply personal. I think this book will fit into the heavyweight category with classics like Essential Cuisine by Michel Bras, published nearly a decade ago and still sought out for its clear vision of the chef's intimate culinary universe in the mountains of southern France.

Like the first Noma book, Essential Cuisine is out of print (a good copy can sell for hundreds of dollars) and like Redzepi, Bras is inspired by his exact time and place. Bras flavors ice cream made with the wild buttercups that grow near the restaurant, for example; Redzepi makes his own beer for cooking with dregs of sweet birch sap. Everything—ingredients, silverware, design, architecture—is informed somehow by nature.

Time and Place is going to impact another generation of cooks, most of whom won't actually dine at NOMA, though it's hard to say how (philosophy? technique? plating?). After all, it's expensive to get to Copenhagen. But this book, unlike a meal at the restaurant (and unlike Redzepi's first book) is easily attainable and totally affordable. I expect that even the jerks who called the restaurant "Whale Penis" have been unable to resist pre-ordering a copy.

You can pre-order NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (Phaidon, 2010) here and read about other notable Nordic restaurants here.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.